bering 7,683. Yet now the Zuñis, made familiar to all by Mr. Cushing's recent residence among them, are almost the sole survivors of that ancient race, and they number only about sixteen hundred persons. And, what is especially to the purpose of the present discussion, this tribe was of all the most isolated, and the least contaminated by either Spanish or Anglo-American civilization; all the other (river) Pueblos, now practically extinct, having been brought more into contact with the influence of the whites.[1] What civilization the Zuñis have (if indeed that term can be used at all where there is no written language), the agriculture, the manufacture of pottery and blankets, are wholly historic in origin, this conservative people never having borrowed anything from the Anglo-Saxon or any other race.
From this brief view of the Indian population we must conclude that, so far from its being on the increase as a whole, as some recent writers have claimed, the gain is entirely confined to those few tribes which deserve in a great degree the epithet commonly applied to them, of the "civilized Indians." Taking the Cherokees as representatives of these tribes, we find that they have been under missionary influence for two hundred and fifty years, and that there were eight thousand religious converts among them so long ago as 1700. The traveler Bartram,[2] writing about 1762, said of them: "They are just, honest, liberal, and hospitable to strangers; considerate, loving, and affectionate to their wives and relations; fond of their children, industrious, frugal, temperate, and persevering, charitable and forbearing." He speaks, moreover, of their wearing woven fabrics, of their police arrangements, their domestic economy, and particularly of their marked loyalty to the dictates of conscience. The Cherokees, then, had fairly entered on the path of progress a hundred and twenty years ago. Today they possess sufficient property, if equally divided, to give each man, woman, and child, a thousand dollars. Their school expense amounts to thirty-five dollars annually per scholar, a sum greater than that similarly expended, even in our great center of philosophy. The proportion of illiteracy is smaller than that throughout the United States. "Their condition is far better than that of the agricultural classes of England."[3] The five civilized tribes have, on the average, a house for every three or four persons, and one hundred and ninety-five schools and one hundred and thirty-one church edifices for the population of sixty thousand individuals.[4]
In view, then, of the time spent and the result reached, we may consider that those tribes which are increasing in numbers have passed through their period of acclimation, and we may still believe that the
